


Those That Make It and Those That Break it

by foolishgames



Category: Mad Max Series (Movies)
Genre: F/M, Future Fic, Gen, Slow Burn
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-07-15
Updated: 2015-08-19
Packaged: 2018-04-09 11:38:42
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 14,886
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4347185
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/foolishgames/pseuds/foolishgames
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Years later, a weary Max returns to the Citadel to find it transformed into a thriving community, benevolent and generous to strange drifters, a place he can finally, maybe, rest. But this friendly desert community is hiding a dark secret, and Max will need to decide whether he's willing to risk his peaceful new life and anonymity in the name of justice.</p><p>A post-apocalyptic police procedural with a side of mutually baffling romance.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

As years went, this one had been hard. The Peb were good people, but their cold, marshy home in the far south was hard-won and hard-defended, and though they were politely, gently grateful to him for his help against the Ouroboros, Max wasn't welcome there. Not really. They gave him a bike, cobbled together from an outboard motor and hope, and sent him on his way with a full tank, plenty of water, and a treasured yeast culture in a sealed plastic tub.

"You have to feed it," said Yuri, whose baby he had saved from the boot of a speeding car without a scratch on its gummy little head. "Like a kid, right? Keep it warm and feed it, and it'll grow. Then you can split it up. And use it."

"Not like a kid, then," said Max, and she'd grinned at him, all her front teeth replaced with shiny bits of shell from where the beach used to be.

Anyway, he had a bike.

He put the Peb in his rearview and the salt on his right – always on his right, now. He had the rising and setting of the sun, his compass, his maps pinned out on whatever scraps of canvas or leather he could scrounge, and the salt wastes on his right. The sun shifted around some – the tilt of the earth if not the turn of the seasons – but now he was sure he was headed north. The Peb had been as far south as south could go before the salt killed everything, and that meant he'd come damn near full circle, and he was almost back where he started.

As if to highlight the disinterested kindness of the Peb, two days later he was attacked by a gang of starvling kids. Sloppy work. He'd been distracted, scanning the horizon where the salt met the sour land for a familiar landmark, and they'd burst from the dunes, shrieking. Babies, the oldest barely grown, with thin, mean faces and small hands. He chased them off his bike, his weapons, but didn't fight too hard over the food. He had a couple days' water in his belt canteen, a full belly, and the yeast tucked in under the bike's motor to keep warm – he'd be okay.

The next day, across the rolling dunes, he spotted a bare steel skeleton thrust up from the sand, pieces of mirror glinting from the top. Nobody around.

He camped the night, unchallenged, and in the morning, he turned his bike west.

Running on empty, he told himself. Trade the yeast for supplies, and then off again.

Crows, then marshes, the sun high in the sky and sinking to a blazing sunset. It was slow going even on his lightweight bike, stinking water and powder-fine sand sucking him down. He had to walk part of the way, pushing it. Pushed on until the ground was dry, slept there for the night, twitching awake at every shift in the wind. Maybe the canyoners would remember him and maybe more likely they wouldn’t, but he wasn’t counting on their kindness to strangers.

But despite all his misgivings, the canyons were quiet. He hardly remembered the way, having been in no shape to navigate either of the last times he’d been through, but the one twisting winding path wide enough to admit a big rig stayed true to his dim recollection. The prickle on the back of his neck told him he was being watched several times, but by the time the sun was at its highest, he was motoring cautiously through the rubble-strewn pass, the red walls scraped viciously, charred with explosions. There were no wrecks, anything metal evidently having been scavenged, but this was the place. The prickle on the back of his neck worsened, and he hunched his shoulders and went faster.

Somebody howled behind him, far-off and wailing. It echoed off the canyon walls, and was joined by another, until the whole place sounded as if it were full of shrieking, mocking voices. But nobody came after him, no dirt-bikes bursting from the cracks in the walls or bullets from the cliffs, and then he was clear, on the open, barren plain with the kicked-up dust and the wind and nothing else.

He took his last swallow of warm, musty water, tucked the empty canteen back in his pack. Things from here were a little hazy: one way propped on front of a maniac’s death-wish, terror-blind and muzzled, the other clinging to Furiosa like he could stop her life draining out with his hands and his stubbornness. His memory wasn’t good at the best of times, but: west. Green and water. Somebody’d know.

He set the compass on the body of the bike where he could see it, and headed west.

 ****~  


He came to the citadel by a straight, stamped-down road: perhaps even the one Furiosa had taken before she turned the wheel. He rode at it crossways, running northeast by southwest before he could see even a smudge of the rocks on the horizon, and sat for some time astride his bike, chewing on his lip, hesitating.

A road like this meant stability, he figured. It was well-rutted, sunk and firm-packed where the wheels of many cars had rolled, and straight, regular, like whoever rode it had no need for evading, for weaving, for varying their path. It was a confident road, he decided. He uncapped his canteen - still empty.

 _Max_ -

-whispered the desert. The child was still there, sometimes.

He shook his head to clear her away and kicked off down the road.

He could smell it before he could clearly see it, or maybe he was just imagining it. A fresh green-growing smell, maybe. Water on dust, the mere suggestion like a balm to his dry throat and stinging eyes. On the horizon, the shapes rose up before him, and the setting sun caught the green which capped them, spilled down the sides. As he got closer he could see the green below as well, in the cupped valley between the peaks, more things growing. It was heartening.

Within a klick of the rocks, now, with the sun setting, and he was being paced suddenly by a mismatched pair of motorcycles - a border patrol. He slowed, slowed, and pulled up, so close he could see a group of small children sitting in the shade of one of the peaks, small faces turned attentively towards their teacher.

“You on business?” said one of the riders. Her bike was angled in front of his, not quite blocking his path, but in the way enough he’d have a hard time with a quick start, and she had a rifle slung across her back and a pistol at her thigh.

He shrugged, shook his head. “Ain’t got trade,” he said. “Just want some water.”

The second rider snorted. “You and all the wastes,” he said. “You can work?”

Max shrugged again. “I can.”

“Water’s for anyone,” said the first rider. “Nobody goes thirsty. But you want food, you work or you trade.”

“I can work,” said Max more firmly.

“Righto. You armed?”

“Mm.” Obviously.

“You go see Goff, she’ll see after you. Weapons are okay, but don’t start shit, yeah?” She was young, this one, and her face lit with importance, like she was telling him a secret. “We got laws about that.”

Her pronouncement seemed to require a response, so Max nodded solemnly, which satisfied her. “Tell me,” he said, before he left them. “Who’s in charge here, now?”

“Ah, you’ve been here before, then?” said the second rider. From the corner of his eye, Max could see him grin. “Well, Old Joe’s dead, did you know? And now we have - skies, what are we calling them this week? Is it the Givers?”

“The Council,” says the young rider chidingly. “It’s been nothing but the Council for almost a thousand days, that joke isn’t funny anymore.”

“I can’t keep up. The Wives, the Mothers, the Water-keepers. The Givers and the Bearers. The War Boys wanted to call them the Valkyries and the Wretched wanted to call them Queens -”

“- and there’s no more Wretched or War Boys or any of that,” interrupted the younger rider. Her face had gone pink with frustration. “And they’re the Council. We vote for them and all.”

“They make the laws, assign work, oversee the growing and the making,” said the older rider. “But her and me, we’re defence and trade.”

“Under Furiosa and the Toast,” she said, visibly ready to burst with pride. They both stopped and peered expectantly at Max. He cleared his throat.

“S’good then,” he said. Nodded. “No more Joe. And water for everyone.”

They both nodded. “It’s good,” said she. “You’ll see, friend. On you go.”

And on he went.

He wasn’t sure what he expected, exactly. His memories of the Citadel were hazy and poor at best: the great peaks, the elevator, the crowds and crowds of people surrounding Joe’s ugly beast of a car, howling for blood. Had there been other buildings, hump-backed adobe huts arrayed in crooked streets? Had there been steel stairs bolted to the cliff-face, spiderwebbing back and forth to the high-up gardens?

There was all that now, and more besides: people moving with busy purpose instead of desperation; small children grubby with play rather than neglect; and plants. In every doorway and window, in jars and clay pots and discarded engines parts, carried in sacks on the shoulders of every second or third person, sprouts and bushes and tufts of green. It was getting dark now, and cool, the inky night settling easily over this strange and surprising town.

He went slowly through the dim streets, trying not to stare, and came eventually to a wide-open plaza at the base of one of the peaks. There were long tables and benches under haphazardly-constructed roofs, and hundreds of people milling about, lining up patiently for something Max couldn’t see, off to one side, but smelled good enough to make his belly clench. Dim electric bulbs hung on poles, casting the whole plaza into a golden, dreamy glow. And drilled firm into the rock wall was a huge cistern fed by massive pipes from above, and as he watched, people walked up to it and twisted the taps to make water come out into their cups or canteens, and walked away drinking. Nobody was fighting over it or shoving anyone else. Somebody filled a cup and tipped it straight over his shoulder, onto the plant he carried, before refilling it for himself.

“Oy,” said someone. “Hey. You on the bike.”

“Hunh?” It was an older man, very tall, with a scarred and weathered face.

“You look lost,” he said.

“I’m,” said Max. _Looking for Furiosa_ , he suspected, would not go down well. “I came in off the road,” he settled on. “They said to come find, uh. Someone.”

“That’s very useful,” said the man. “You looking to stay or just passing through? Trading, working, what?”

“Working,” said Max. “Dunno ‘bout staying, but I can work.”

“S’good. You wanna see Goff, she bosses the strong workers. You strong? Full-life?”

Max flinched, just a little, and curled a hand around the bike handle again. “Strong enough,” he said, and the man snickered.

“Don’t get sand in yer knickers, son. Just a question. Hey Goff! Goff!” he called across the plaza. “Fresh meat for ya.”

Goff was a small, wiry woman with shrewd dark eyes and dark skin. She looked Max up and down where he was still uneasily astride his bike, clutching his pack, and nodded.

“You look like a man who could shovel some shit,” she said approvingly. “You reckon you could shovel some shit?”

“Yeah?” said Max.

“Aces. Tomorrow at sun-up you be at the pit on the southside - you see over there? Behind the big kitchen, yeah?” Max nodded. “You’re reporting to Spokes, he’s got -” and here she made a gesture by her ears which Max couldn’t decipher. “You’ll find him.” She clapped her hands. “Right. You eaten? No? Line up with the rest of ‘em, then. First one’s on the house, but if you don’t show up for working tomorrow there’ll be a storm to come.” Somebody called out to her across the plaza, and she knuckled Max’s shoulder in a friendly fashion and wheeled off, leaving him feeling winded and alarmed.

“You can stow your ride,” said his new friend. “You gotta name?”

“No. You?”

“Call me Thick, my ma always did. Here, shove it there -” under an overhang, with another bike and a push-wagon full of clutter and a startled lizard eeling out of the shadows. Max hesitated, but Thick made an impatient gesture. “Just for the minute, we ain’t going far. You thirsty? Yeah, you are. Everyone is when they come in out the waste. Go on.”

Max left the bike, but he took his pack with him, dug out his empty canteen. Nobody stopped him turning the tap and filling up, and nobody so much as looked at him as he drank it slowly, mouthful by cautious mouthful. It was cool and tasted slightly metallic, like the tank it was in. A child bumped against his hip, muttered an apology, and stuck her cup under the same tap he’d just used, and he quashed the insane urge to knock her away, waited patiently. When she was done, he refilled his canteen, put the lid on tightly, and tucked it back into his bag.

“You’ll get used to it, if you stay,” said Thick. “Water enough for everyone. Got a lady in my bunk, she’s a teacher, real smart, she says there’s a whole fresh ocean deep underground. If we’re careful, she says, there’s enough water for a million days, probably.”

Max grunted dubiously, and followed Thick to stand in line behind a pair of young women in bulky leathers, leaning heavily on each other and murmuring about a grounding station. His stomach rumbled viciously in anticipation - the last jerky and crackers the Peb had given him were days ago.

At the front of the line, he was handed a clay bowl, and the person behind the table dumped into it a measured ladleful of something white and mashed, topped it with something brown and lumpy, and capped the whole thing off with a dense grey biscuit of some sort.

“Oh, potato night,” said Thick happily.

They found seats at one of the benches scattered around. Max ate slowly; his empty belly was cramping on just the water he’d drunk, but the food was bland enough not to unsettle him. Filling. The brown stuff was a very salty mystery with chunks of something green and soggy, and the biscuit was bland and dry, but the potatoes were fluffy and a little sweet, stirring up some distant, hoarded memory in the back of his mind. He had to stop halfway through the bowl and sip on some water while it settled, though.

The crowd moved around him, busy and peaceful. Thick had turned away and was talking to somebody further down the table. There was a burst of uproarious laughter a little ways away; a child’s voice wailing in a way that meant tired not frightened; somebody drumming a slow, rhythmic roll in the distance. Max breathed in, felt the full ache of his belly and the weariness of his bones.

If he craned his head back, he could see up the side of the rock: it was the one where the water had been poured out from in Joe’s time. The skull was gone now, but it was too dark to make out what had replaced it. Behind him, then, were the garages and the Warboy pits: the hellish place he’d been kept and drained and used, and the enormous elevator that he’d jumped from, rising up to take Furiosa and the girls away from him. He wondered what was there now. It was bizarre, like a fever-dream, that such a place like this could be so easily painted over the top of the misery and squalor that had been here.

“Hey,” he said to Thick. “How many people here?”

Thick shrugged, using his finger to swipe the last dregs of food from his bowl. “Ten, eleven thousand? Dunno. Goff’d know, or Liara - she has her numbers, works up in the thumb on-” he paused, licked his lips “- dis-tri-bution.” He nodded, satisfied. “Gotta make sure there’s enough for everyone.”

“Is there?” The largess was absurd. Ten, eleven thousand people, and all of them fed and watered and busy? Impossible.

But Thick just grinned. “Nobody gone hungry here in a thousand days, nor thirsty in near two thousand,” he boasted. “It took some doing, even after old Joe lost his head, but the trick, the trick is.” He leaned in, conspiratorial, and then busted out a creaky laugh. “Nah, no trick. Hard work and care, it is. We know who killed the world.”

Max twitched. Who killed the world, who killed the world, who killed the world? The face that flashed before him wasn’t the dark-haired child this time but a fierce, defiant young woman, golden and scarred in the dusty sunlight. Of all the things that he’d taken from the run on Fury Road, her question - who killed the world? - had sat in his mind, returning to pick at him at the oddest moments. He couldn’t work out why it mattered. The world was dead, and he and her and all the others were scrabbling in the dirt left behind, and that was all. Who cared who pulled the trigger?

Thick nudged him. “Full up, friend? Right. Wash it up - there - and then you’ll be in the bunkhouse for the night, I reckon.”

“M’bike?” said Max.

“Aw, it’ll be fine - garages are closed up already but tomorrow you can talk to someone about getting it stowed. Can’t leave it lying around. Kids’ll get ideas.”

Thick pointed out the bunkhouse - a long, low building used to house transients, traders, and temporary residents - and the discreet shack behind it. “Plumbing’s a work in progress,” he said ruefully. “You remember where you hafta go in the morning? Good. Right, that’s me done.” And he disappeared off into the gathering gloom.

There were a handful of people in the bunkhouse, most of whom didn’t even look up when Max entered. The night had been cooling quickly, but the bunkhouse walls were thick and solid, and it was warm. He picked an unoccupied pallet, and when nobody objected, jammed his pack between himself and the wall and toppled down into sleep.

 ****~  


Max slept well. Which meant he slept at all; in brief restless snatches, skimming the surface of consciousness and rousing with a start at the slightest noise. There were a dozen other people in the bunkhouse, snoring and stirring and wandering about in the dark, stubbing their toes. Outside he could hear distant engines, lowered voices, the occasional clang of machinery and the rush of water through the pipes, the scuff of feet on sand. But he slept, some.

He was up well before sunrise when the sky was just beginning to pale, but he was far from the first. The streets - streets! - of the small town in the valley of the rocks weren’t bustling the way they had been the night before, but people were stirring, wandering sleepily around or marching with purpose in a variety of directions.

Max drank the last of his water and, greatly daring, went back to the cistern to get more. It was chilled from the desert night, and he topped off his canteen and hung it on his belt in preparation for the day. He could get more tonight. There was a young woman at the next spigot down filling a largish canister; she had her head leaned against the cool wall of the cistern and appeared to be half-asleep, stirring when the water splashed over her wrist. Max tried not to stare.

As it grew lighter, he could see more of the strange place this had become - the buildings were low and long, with thick, rounded earthen walls and small windows. Electricity, it seemed, was confined to the rocky towers and a few nearby spaces, and the plumbing in the scattered outhouses was rudimentary at best. He couldn’t work out if the Citadel-that-was, the great fingers of stone, were a part of the town or were something else now; separate as they had been in Joe’s time. But there was water, and there was food, and a place to sleep, and his motorcycle was still tucked where he had left it, though it was being inspected closely by three small children who scattered at his approach. Unmolested, too, when he checked - the remaining fuel still in the tank, all parts intact. He patted the fuel tank fondly and made a mental note to track down what Thick had said the night before, about stowing it in the garages.

The pits to the south of the kitchens were easy enough to find by following his nose: Goff, it seemed, had been speaking of literal shit-shoveling. The sun was peeking over the mountains now, the chill of the night already being swallowed into the breathless heat of the wasteland summer. Others were moving in the same direction as he was, out from the collection of buildings gathered in the rocks, to where deep holes had been gouged out of the wasteland and covered over to protect from the unrelenting sun. A motley collection of vehicles, most of them towing trailers or flatbeds, had gathered near the edge of the nearest pit, and it was there that the other workers seemed to be congregating, so Max followed them, keeping his head down.

Atop one truck sat a skinny, stretched-out looking fellow of indeterminate age with a truly baffling amount of piercings in his ears and face, bright slices of various metals sticking out the sides of his head.

“You Spokes?” Max said. “Goff sent me.”

“A-yup.” Spokes squinted down at him thoughtfully. “You got a name?” Max shook his head, and Spokes sighed and picked up a slate off the roof of the car next to him. “Well, I gotta put something down, or you don’t get fed, friend. You strong in the body? Okay to do shovelling?”

Max grunted an affirmative, then hesitated. “Bad leg,” he allowed, and lifted his left hand. “Busted hand, some. Should be okay.” The hand had never been the same after his last visit to the Citadel; it had been smashed and stabbed and badly battered in ways he couldn’t clearly remember. It still ached often, and the two smallest fingers were gnarled and numb, and he couldn’t make a fist, but it was healed and he could use it okay.

Spokes nodded and scrawled something illegible on his slate. “You let me know, nameless,” he said. “No need to break you on your first day. Plenty of work for them as can’t shovel shit.” He grinned. Most of his teeth were lumps of steel, and one was a wicked-looking spike. “Else grab a shovel, friend - and think of a name for yourself before we break for high-sun.”

So Max grabbed a shovel, and waited to be told what to do. It was refreshing, actually, in a different way than the water or the food or the safe place to sleep. The motley collection of warm bodies were efficiently divided into crews of eight, and Max shuffled after his crew leader into one of the pits and set to work. It was simple, hard labour, digging over the soft rotting stuff to mix it, or loading it into barrows to be put on the trailers and taken to the gardens. He wielded the shovel, and when he was done his back and shoulders had an honest tired ache and he could easily see the results of his efforts, and he could go to his crew leader and get a new task which could also be completed with the strength of his arms and no danger to anybody.

Hours passed this way, and the sun was high in the sky when the crew leader called stop and the workers straggled out of the pits and into the fresh air. Without instruction, they began to wander back towards the citadel; only Max hesitated, seeing his crew head in conference with Spokes.

“Don’t worry, you’ve done solid work,” said the crew head, a very small woman with a wine-stain birthmark covering her face. “You staying around?”

Max shrugged. “Maybe. For a while.”

She looked him over head to toe, like she was sizing him up for parts. “Hmmm,” she grunted. “Right then.”

“Still need a name for you,” Spokes pointed out. “Unless you want me to name you?”

Max did not want Spokes to name him. “Uh,” he said, gathering his thoughts. “I had a friend once. Called me Fool.”

Spokes looked like he was waiting for a punchline. When Max fell silent, Spokes sighed and made a note. “Fool. You in the bunkhouse?”

“Was last night.”

“If you decide you’re staying, we can see about finding you a flop. You’ll have to share, but it’ll be more private.” Max nodded, shifted his mucked-up boots on the dirt. “Uh. Did someone go over the rules with you? Nah? Typical.” He hitched his shoulder and gestured for Max and the crew head to walk with him back towards the city. “Everybody as can work, works. Nobody goes thirsty. You don’t do violence on another person -”

“Except in self-defence,” chimed in the crew head.

“- obviously except in self-defence, Rani, that’s obvious - and you take only what’s yours and what’s given free or traded willing.” He sniffed, pinned Max with a pointed look. “That goes for sex too, Fool. Lay a hand on a woman unwilling in Citadel and Furiosa will cut your actual balls off, right?”

“She will not,” said Rani, sounding scandalised. Max squinted at her. “She’d just shoot you. Think we’re gonna waste medical care on a raping schlanger? Nah.”

“Cutting off his balls sounds better,” said Spokes. “But sure. Okay. You give to the community, you work and do your part, and we take care of you. You get food, water, place to flop. Good life, right?”

Max nodded. “And them up there?” he asked, pointing up to the tower of rock.

Spokes looked baffled, but Rani just snorted. “Oh, the Council? They’re alright. Keep the water running and the crops growing, and they’ve set up schools and things for the kids.” She had to lengthen her stride to keep up, but it didn’t seem to worry her. “And it isn’t as if they’re locked away from us up there, either. Anyone can go up, it’s mostly workshops up there now anyway.”

“And in the Thumb there’s classrooms and greenhouses,” said Spokes. “I think there’s bunks for the kids who are sick, too, in the bubble, away from any badness in the air.”

“And storage, and water pumps, and the garages in the Fingers,” said Rani, ticking off on her fingers. “Weapons. Umm.”

“Thumb?” said Max, baffled.

Spokes made a shape with his hand - palm-up and cupped, with the thumb and fingers pointing skyward, the pointer and middle fingers pressed slightly apart from the others. “The rocks make a hand, see?” Max squinted against the sun. “Look, that one where the water comes from, that’s the thumb. It’s apart from the others, they’re the fingers, like that.” Three protrusions of rock, Max could see it now - thumb apart, the two lumps for fingers closer together, almost joined. He copied the gesture with his good hand. “And then there’s us, we live in the palm,” said Spokes.

“Don’t ask about the dirty jokes,” advised Rani. “We’ve heard ‘em all. Fingers, palm, the lot. None of ‘em are funny.”

The high-sun time - the hours of the day when the sun was so hot and intense people got sick, dizzy, burned - were generally spent in leisure, Max learned, at least for those who worked outside. He took the opportunity to find the garages in the Fingers, where the Warboys had been, and to get his motorcycle stowed. He was given a token of stamped metal, and his name was chalked on the side of the bike.

“We won’t use it for parts or alter it, and you can take it anytime you want,” said the mechanic, who bore the facial scars of a former Warboy. “But we might use it if we need that kind of vehicle.” He shrugged one crooked shoulder. There were dozens of other cars and bikes in this big space alone. Max grunted his assent, took his token, and retreated from the too-familiar cave with more haste than grace.

It was still hot, brutally so, when they returned to work in the afternoon, and Rani checked that everyone had drunk water, and handed out small cakes made of mashed bean to tide them over until dinner. Max ate only half of his and tucked the rest away, out of habit.

“There’s more,” said one of his crewmates. At his inquisitive grunt, she smiled hesitantly. “I do that too sometimes,” she said, nodding to the pocket he’d put the food in. “I forget that there’s more coming. Like I’m still in the waste and I gotta make it last because who knows when I’ll have more.”

Max looked at her. She was a slight thing, quite young, still bearing the rangy look of somebody who’d been hungry too often too recently. But the muscles stood out in her arms and shoulders, and she hefted her shovel easily. “Habit,” he grunted, and shook his head, falling into rhythm digging next to her.

“I know,” she said, nodding. “Not saying you can’t. Just you don’t have to. I’m Kez.”

“Fool.” Max jerked sharply, shook his head again. “Me. I’m Fool.”

Kez cocked her head. “Sounds like a story. No? Okay. No stories. I talk a lot, sorry.”

“S’okay.”

“You been here long?”

“Yesterday.”

She whistled through her teeth. “Shit, you are shiny-new. Sorry. I shouldn’t jump on you then, should let you just get used to it, food and water and things. I been here sixteen days, me, but I was here before that and then I was in Gas-Town. There was a fella, said he make me rich as the Immortan -” she paused her narrative to spit, like it was part of the word, Immortan-pfuh, “- but he was a lying schlanger and Gas-Town’s a hole, so I hitched a ride back.”

She didn’t ask where Max had come from, and the conversation lapsed as they loaded their barrows and hauled them to the trucks.

“Came from the south,” said Max, as they paused for a mouthful of water. “Long way.”

“Is it true the days are shorter in the south?”

Max shrugged. “Sometimes.” Something about the tilt of the planet, something he’d had no reason to know for years and had forgotten, only the effects remaining: shorter days, sometimes, some places.

“Shine,” said Kez. “Bet it wouldn’t be as hot if the days were shorter. I never been that far, I don’t think.”

“Better here,” Max assured her, held up his still-half-full canteen as evidence. He’d drunk more water in the last day than in the entire week before that. He’d pissed three times already today and could feel the pressure in his belly again already.

“It’s a good place,” said Kez contentedly. “Not many of those around, I shouldn’ta left.”

 ****~  


He came into the plaza the following day after another satisfying morning of work, digging fertiliser into the harsh, dry ground to make it soft and new. His boots were caked with black, crumbly soil and blisters were coming up on his palms. Rani had inspected them critically and told him to get some gloves: trade for them, she said, or go to the city stores and see if they had some. Max had just shrugged; his skin would toughen with the work.

With the sun high and the heat intense, there were fewer people in the plaza than in the cool evenings when people gathered to eat. Most people retreated to the shade of their homes or the large common areas under the Fingers, where the stone stole away the heat. But that was a lot of people, and Max was tired of people and their closeness. He wanted water and some quiet, and he hoped that nobody would be in the bunkhouse for a while. But his quest for water was stymied; the big cistern was quiet instead of rumbling with water, and one of the taps had been taken off and the socket remaining was dripping as a woman did something to it with a shifter.

She turned, frowning, and crouched to rummage in the tool bag by her feet. Max swallowed, his throat clicking dryly, and backed carefully up until he was in the shadow of one of the food tents, hidden partly behind a pole.

Furiosa looked much as he remembered: very tall, lean and strong, focused on her task. But she had lost the hellbent urgency he so strongly associated with her: she twisted her mouth to the side thoughtfully and scratched her fuzzy head as she sorted through the parts she had, holding one up to the light to look at it more closely, discarding it and selecting another, shaking her head with a sigh.

“Is the water stopped flowing?”

Max jumped and shoved himself more firmly into his corner, but it was only a child, small and grubby, addressing Furiosa boldly around the hand it had shoved in its mouth.

“I turned it off for a minute,” said Furiosa. “I have to fix this.”

“S’wrong?” said the kid.

Furiosa looked down at the little - girl? - with the slightly alarmed expression of somebody who didn’t spend much time around children. “The seal has broken on this one, see? There’s a crack. So the water leaks out.”

“Even when nobody’s here?” The child was openly horrified. “Just into the sand? That’s _wasteful_.”

“You’re right,” said Furiosa. “But I have one to replace it right here.” She held it up for inspection, and the child squinted dubiously at it. “Want to help?”

What followed certainly took more time and effort than the procedure would have had Furiosa done it alone. Max hung onto the pole he was hiding behind and watched and watched, drinking in the sight of her, how calm and content she was, the strength in the line of her back that meant health and ease. She was awkwardly patient with the child, who positively puffed with importance under her attention, and they managed eventually to get the tap fastened back into place.

“Will the water flow now?” said the child.

“Uh-huh,” said Furiosa. She stepped back and let out a low whistle, squinting up the side of the rock: a light flashed from the cavern far overhead, and she waved her hand in a wide circle. With a groan and a rumble, the pipes started up, and the kid stared at the newly-replaced tap like she expected it to fly off.

“Should we check it?” said Furiosa, and rummaged up a canister from her toolbag. The child turned the spigot, and clear water sputtered, then flowed.

“It wo-o-orked!” hooted the kid, doing an excited, hopping dance. “We fixed it!”

“We sure did,” said Furiosa. “Good job, kid.” She was smiling - laughing, almost, leaning against the cistern with her teeth all showing and her eyes shining.

Max had been grateful and glad to see her again, whole and well and content: he was utterly unprepared to see her smiling in the sunshine. She had been, in his memory, a thing of gritted teeth and exposed nerve. He recalled her stunning violence and unexpected kindness, her competence and determination, but her ease was new; her joy was unfamiliar and unfairly affecting. He didn’t know how to feel about her paying a small child with a handful of blueberries and hair-ruffle, drinking water so fast it dribbled down her chin, scrubbing a damp hand over her cropped hair and stretching out her shoulders. She paused to exchange brief words with one of the cooks and then walked away, her stride long and easy, towards the stairs.

Max sank onto a nearby bench, exhaled shakily.

“Want a bl’berry?” The kid looked up at him with wide eyes, purple juice smeared on her mouth. “Furiosa got it me for workin’. But it’s good to share.” She held up a squashed palmful of fruit.

“Thanks,” said Max, taking one carefully between his fingers. “You did good work.”

Instead of answering, the kid bounced twice on her heels, happily, and went to offer a share of her bounty to the cooks.

When he was sure Furiosa was gone, Max went and filled up his canteen with fresh water and retreated to the bunkhouse to wait out the hottest hours in the quiet.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> 1\. Don't ask me how many times I watched the Citadel scenes to get the layout right.  
> 2\. Did you know you can just, like, make penicillin in your kitchen? I mean. Don't actually do it, fanfic reader, go to the doctor if you are sick. But it's possible!  
> 3\. I am on tumblr at fools-game if you are into that sort of thing.


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Max continues to build his quiet life in the Palm, but violence follows him even here.  
> I continue to take many thousands of words more than necessary to get to the damn point, sorry.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks to aka_vee,who prods me along with suggestions like "Max should be a baker" and "Think about Max covered in flour and kneading dough" and "You know, slapping Furiosa's hand away from the fresh scones". Max does not become a baker in this fic, sorry.

It’s good to share, the little kid had said, and Max remembered with sudden alarm the yeast culture he had stuffed in his pack.

The tub had been tossed around a bit in the past few days, but the lid was still sealed up okay. He got the lid off and squinted uncertainly into the container. Yuri had told him he had to feed it, but he hadn’t really thought much about it since leaving the Peb - seven, eight days ago? Longer? How long could yeast live without feeding?

A cautious sniff revealed a beery, fermented smell, and when he held it up to the light, he could see a light froth on top of the white stuff. That was probably a good sign, he thought - or a very bad one. Did yeast go rancid? He didn’t know. This was one for the experts.

The kitchen was a sprawling mess, half in one of the old garages underneath the Fingers, half haphazardly-strung tents over cooking fires. Max ducked through the tables where food was being chopped and measured and carefully portioned, past the big wheeled bins where the scraps were collected for composting, and hovered uncertainly by the open tanks half-full of starchy, cloudy water discarded from cooking and bound for the gardens.

“You ain’t a cook,” said a young man, “Look out,” as he heaved a pot full of steaming water, stained yellow from boiling roots or something, into the nearest tank. “Better not be here to nick something,” he continued.

Max shook his head. “Got something for food,” he said, lifting up the tub of yeast.

“To trade?” said the boy. “Let’s see, then.”

“Nah,” said Max. “To use. It’s yeast.”

The boy blinked at him. “Serious?” When Max only shrugged, the kid leaned over a nearby table and bellowed “GRAN,” at the top of his lungs. “GRAN COME QUICK.”

Max shrank back against the wall as the yell attracted the attention of every single person nearby, and all eyes were suddenly on him and his little tub.

“What’s this?” someone said. “Jek, what you shouting for?”

“Fella reckons he’s got yeast,” said Jek, reaching for Max’s offering. “Lemme see.”

“Fuck, yeast,” came from the crowd. “Yeast, we could make bread.”

“Aw, shit,” said someone else. “Check it, check if it’s still good.”

“How the fuck should I know?” said Jek, prising off the top. “GRAN has anyone seen Gran.”

“Don’t you yell at me, pup,” said somebody else, and the crowd parted to reveal, presumably, Gran. “I don’t move like I used to.” She was skinny and bent near in half, like a snapped antenna, and leaned on a stick almost as crooked as she was. She squinted up at Max, taking an apparent immediate dislike to him. “What are you shouting about?”

“He’s brung yeast, Gran,” said Jek, holding out the container. Gran grunted and stuck a bony wrinkled finger into the foamy mess, scooped some out and sucked it off. There was a moment of breathless anticipation, a hush settling over the kitchens, as Gran’s face wrinkled impossibly further in contemplation.

“Fuck me running,” she said at last. “We can make _beer_.”

The kitchen staff near exploded with delight, cheers and laughter and excited chatter from all sides. Max shrank away from it. Nobody seemed inclined to pay much attention to him, so he slipped out to the sounds of a spontaneous sing-along about how great beer was going to be, and some bright spark saying “Shit - wait, no, listen. Penicillin!” followed by a unanimous scream of approval. Somebody went haring past him, headed for the Thumb, yelling about mold cultures and citrus.

So that was good. The thought of bread-and-beer-and-medicine warmed him all afternoon, through the sunburn on his neck and his stinging palms and the almost-unbearable pressure of all of the people around him, of dodging other bodies and avoiding other eyes. His work crew, he was beginning to realise, was formed mostly of newcomers like himself who hadn’t yet moved on to more specialised, permanent work. Kez was an unexpected blessing - she liked to talk, yes, but she expected nothing in return, and she was happy to tell him about the Hand and its inhabitants. From Kez he learned that Gas-Town and the Bullet Farm had some time ago reached an uneasy truce with the Council, since it was the only water source for days in any direction. But the shifting, increasingly peaceable culture of the people here had little call for the massive quantities of guzzoline the Warboys had demanded and even less for bullets. Both were used cautiously and sparingly, if at all.

“Can’t re-use ‘em, right,” said Kez. “Bullets especially. Only got one job, and that’s killing, and once they’re gone they’re gone. And guzz -” she paused and huffed, squinting up at the Fingers. “Well, I guess we need it, for patrols and trading parties and things.” She sounded uncertain.

“Cooking,” chimed in Macka, who was shorter even than Kez and fancied himself an expert in most things. “Gotta have fuel for cooking. And running the generators.”

“They got the wind turbines, though,” said Kez.

“Right,” said Macka. “Wind turbines, obviously. But guzz for backup, you know, in case.”

“But not much,” insisted Kez. “Right? Not like in the Joe days. We don’t waste it on - on flamers and war parties and _hooning_.” She scoffed. “Reckon the Council’ll be trying to figure out how to make our own, soonish. Gas-Town’s not a good place, they won’t want to keep trading with ‘em long-term.

“Oh, what would you know,” said Macka, and they set to squabbling good-naturedly about mining equipment and solar cooking and alternative uses for camel dung. Max hadn’t known there were camels around, and he was mildly alarmed.

The conversation continued without requiring much input from him - when Kez got flustered over the suitability of venomous spiders as a protein source, Akuna from the next planting bed over chimed in with an anecdote about scorpions, which prompted Macka to launch into an off-colour story about a man he’d known called the Scorpion, which made Kez sputter in disgust and swear off eating bugs forever.

By the time Rani called it a day and sent them off for the evening meal, Max was feeling itchy all over from the talk. It wasn’t unpleasant, was the thing - none of the crew seemed to expect him to talk much, and he wasn’t the only one staying silent. It was just - people. He wasn’t used to all the people yet, and it made him jump at sounds and flinch from touch, even Kez’s gentle hand on his elbow.

“You gonna rabbit?” she said.

Max hunched his shoulders. “Nah, dinner first.”

She nodded and didn’t touch him again.

He regretted not rabbiting as soon as he got to the front of the line at the kitchen - the woman serving blinked at him and her face lit up in recognition. “Hey you!” she said.

“Nah, not me,” said Max.

“Yeah,” she said. “Gran wants to see you. We got trade for you.”

“Don’t need trade,” said Max. “Not what it was for.”

“You’re holding up the line,” said Kez. “What’d you trade anyway?”

“Nothing,” said Max.

“Yeast,” said the cook. Kez looked blank. “Best get it over with,” said the cook cheerfully. “We all saw you, you’ll be having this same conversation every meal for days.”

She had a point. He collected his bowl of lentils-and-greens, grunted something at Kez, and followed her resentfully into the depths of the kitchens, to a cool, dark room with a complicated lock on its thick steel door. The shelves inside were packed with rarities: sacks of grain, fresh vegetables, glass bottles of unidentified liquids and powders he thought might be spices, jars of pickled and preserved things. Not enough food to feed ten thousand people for very long, he thought, but the contents of this room were better than pure gold in the Waste.

Gran was bent over a table, peering at a ledger an inch from her nose. Max braced himself for more talking, but she only looked up at him, said “Oh, you,” in a distracted tone, and waved a hand at the woman who’d brought him in.

“Here you go,” she said, and hefted a box off a nearby shelf. “We reckon this is probably fair in trade, but stop by tomorrow morning before early shift and we’ll get you some of the bread. Won’t be enough for the whole place and it’ll take us some time to get the recipe right, so we’ll experiment on you.”

“Uh,” said Max dumbly, and took the box, struggling to juggle it with his bowl of food. “I don’t…” But he was being shooed out and away.

“Is yeast really that good to eat?” said Kez, when he found her and the rest of the crew eventually among the tables.

Max shrugged. “No. It makes other good things to eat.” (“I said that!” said Macka indignantly.)

“Oh.” Kez still looked unsatisfied. “Well, what’d you get?”

A jumble of things, apparently - some vegetables pickled in jars which would keep well for a while, and a slab of the hardtack stuff, some dried meat, even a fist-sized lump of pale cheese. But the real prize was a covered bowl of fresh, sweet raspberries, still sun-warm and bursting with juice.

“I guess they really like yeast,” said Kez faintly, eyeing the fruit. “Uh.”

Max nudged the bowl towards her. “Go on.”

“Fuckin’ raspberries,” said Macka. Across the table, Rani’s fingers twitched.

Max shrugged, said “Leave some for me, ok?” and tucked into his dinner.

~

Max had been at the Hand fourteen days when Rani pulled him aside at high-sun for a talk.

“I asked you before if you were staying around,” she said. “You had time to think about it?”

Max scratched his nose. “I guess,” he said. “Yeah.”

“Don’t run me down with enthusiasm,” said Rani. “Look, it’s only if you want, but they’re finishing up a new flophouse on the south edge with double rooms for people, so if you’re staying, you can at least get out of the public bunks.”

Max looked up at the blue sky, which offered no answers. “Yes please,” he managed. “That’d be good.”

“Good,” said Rani. “Right. So. I’ll tell Spokes, and your name’ll go on the lists, and you can vote in elections and get medical care, s’long as you keep turning up to work and don’t make trouble. You still going by Fool?”

Max nodded. “That okay?”

“Your life,” Rani shrugged. “Right. You’re a hard worker, and I can tell you’re a smart one, so I gotta ask. Do you want to keep doing this? Digging shit, and hauling things and strong-body stuff? There are other jobs you can try for, if you want.”

The sky, again, had no advice. “Dunno,” said Max. “Like what?”

“What are you good at?” asked Rani. “Gran in the kitchens said she’d have you like a shot, so you’ve made a good impression there. You’re strong and quick, so you could get onto one of the crop teams, actually tending the gardens, or harvesting. Are you any good at machines? Building? Stitching? Midwifery?”

Max snorted. “Nah,” he said. “I’m, mostly, y’know. What’s needed.” He shifted uneasily. “Do okay shooting, driving.”

“Nobody allowed on defense until they’ve been here awhile,” said Rani. “It’s isn’t that we don’t trust you. But we don’t trust you.”

Max nodded: that was fair, and pretty smart. “I’m okay on doing grunt stuff for a while,” he said. “Unless they need the hands elsewhere.”

“There’s hands enough to go around,” said Rani, clapping him on the shoulder. “And I’ll be happy to keep you on my crew, frankly. You do good work.”

Max grunted to show he appreciated the thought, and accepted a bean cake to celebrate his new permanent status.

“It’s exciting!” said Kez, later. “You could be a blackthumb, or a baker - d’you hear we’re getting bread soon? They’ve got to grow the culture more first, but Jek reckons they’ll have enough for everyone in the city by the two-thousand day festival.”

Max sighed into his broth. “I like the work-crew. I’ll keep doing this.”

“I want to work in the cloth ‘shop,” said Kez. “They’re growing flax and nettle now, and weaving it into new fabric for clothes. But they won’t train me up yet, ‘cause I ran off to Gas-Town before.” She pulled a face. “That’s fair, probably.”

“You’ll get ‘em,” said Macka encouragingly. “Keep your head down and work hard.”

“Obviously,” said Kez. “No fear of me running off again. Gas-Town doesn’t have carrots.” She popped one into her mouth.

The room Max was assigned in the flophouse was a small cell with a small window in the thick wall and no door in the opening to the corridor. It was large enough, just, to walk between the two pallets against the walls. His roommate was a woman of uncertain years, with a frail, alarmed look to her. She and Max assessed one another warily and mutually elected a policy of ignoring each other. The first night, Max made a point of lying down before her and feigning sleep, letting her settle for the night without feeling watched.

Ten days later, Rani’s crew were moved from digging and fertilising new garden beds to the Knuckleyard. It was an ominous name for a not-particularly-interesting part of the Hand: a loosely-corralled dumping ground for scrap, rubbish and assorted detritus at the outer base of the Little-and-Ring Fingers.

“There’s usable metal in this mess,” Rani told them. “Find it. There’s fibers and fluffy bits for insulating and mulching, there’s part and pipes we can use, there’s glass, there’s circuitry that the wizards can make things off and plastic we can melt down.”

Kez put up a hand, shyly. “What’s circ-usry?”

Rani rummaged around in the box by her side and drew out a bright green silicone chip. “Don’t ask me what it does,” she said. “All I know is they can be used for something, them and wiring - the kind in rubber casing, okay? Questions? Alright. Drag some of it into the shade if you can, there’s not much cover this side.”

It was different to the garden work; harder, in some ways. Max plucked up half a mangled bicycle and a sack that made clinking noises and sat in the shade, rummaging. Rani had a pair of pliers, when he asked, to strip the rubber from the handles and the plastic from the pedals until he had a pile of scratched aluminum and a pile of other stuff. It was fiddly, and he broke a sweat even sitting in the shade. The sack turned out to contain a variety of stuff, mostly battered plastic children’s toys rendered horrifying and otherworldly by decades of wear and exposure.

Macka let out a long stream of curses, followed by a deep sigh. “I found some glass,” he said sadly. His hand was bleeding freely.

“Oh, smeg,” said Rani, heartfelt. “That looks deep - go on into Thumb and get it looked at. No, put pressure on it - feck. Kez, go with him and make sure he doesn’t bleed out halfway up. Everyone, please be careful grabbing things, watch yourself, alright?”

“I pricked my finger,” said Akuna. “I need to go lie down.”

“I dropped something heavy on my foot,” said Hue, picking up on the game.

“This bag,” said Max seriously, “is full of spiders. Oh no.”

“None of youse are getting dinner tonight,” said Rani grumpily. “Thanks I get for trying to stop you chopping your fingers off.”

Max had finished sorting the plastic and was just dumping the sack into the “Stuff that could be used as it is” pile when the siren sounded. Rani shot to her feet with a sharp inhale, scanning the horizon, but Max had spotted it already.

“Incoming,” he said. The dust cloud on the horizon might have been the wind, or a storm, or nothing, but the sirens meant one of the lookouts in the heights had a clearer view, meant it was a concern.

“Drop everything and get set,” said Rani. All joking was gone from her face and voice, and she spoke clearly and rapidly, scanning their faces intently. “Listen good. That siren says we got a war party incoming. Each of you can get on defense, or you can hole up in the Fingers, and nobody will rouse at you, there’s no mandate to fight if you can’t or you won’t. But you gotta choose by the time we get to the elevator, because once it’s up it ain’t coming back down, okay? Grab your gear, leave the stuff, and follow.”

Kez and Macka were hopefully already in the Thumb, which left just six on their crew: Max, Rani, sweet little Hue and her sister Akuna, a tough old bloke called Matty, and a nervous teenage boy called Spout. They joined the hundred of citizens streaming for the great elevator, called by the warning siren, the winding streets abruptly crowded and busy. Max kept an eye on Hue, who was slight and nervous and tended to be buffeted around in a crowd, and Matty, who couldn’t move very fast.

When they reached the cluster of bodies in front of the Fingers, the illusion of busy, united purpose dissolved. People rushed back and forth, on the brink of panic. Some climbed onto the waiting platform and others leapt off, seemingly at random. Somebody had a loudspeaker and was attempting to be heard over the ruckus. Spout seemed frozen with terror, so Max made an apologetic noise and picked him up by the waist, ignoring his shriek, and lifted him bodily onto the elevator, where he was taken in hand by an enormously broad-shouldered woman. “Sorry,” he said. “You’ll be okay.” He helped a grumbling Matty up - “If I were a few years younger!” - and clapped Hue on the shoulder.

“She meant it,” he told the frightened girl seriously. “You can go, it’ll be okay.”

She looked at him with wide eyes. “They’re coming to kill us,” she said. “Coming to steal our water and our food.”

“Yes.”

Hue’s fists clenched. “I want to fight,” she said. “Akuna?”

Her taller sister grabbed her hand. “You sure?” A nod. “Okay.” They both looked at Max, who shrugged: he had no more idea of what would happen now than anyone.

The elevator eventually rose ponderously up into the garages above, and somebody let off several sharp snapping shots to get the attention of those who remained. Max missed the first part of the directions over the loudspeaker, because the person addressing them in level, calm tones was the tiny dark-skinned wife with the sulky mouth and eyes sharp enough to cut. Her hair had grown long and was in dozens of tiny braids to keep it out of her face, and she wore trousers and boots and layers of shirts instead of flimsy cotton underthings, but she still stood with her chin jutted stubbornly, still spoke in a bland unshaking voice as she directed the uneasy masses at her command.

“-on the roofs and out of the streets,” she said. “Pick off stragglers and strays, keep them moving down the main boulevard.” She pointed. “This is the only way big enough to let through most vehicles, so they’ll bottleneck here and we can take them out. Even if they breach this, the elevator is raised - if they want to get up into the Fingers or the Thumb, they’ll have to take the stairs.” She grinned, fiercely humourless. “I hope they enjoy that.”

Max suspected the stairs would not be undefended.

“Stay sharp,” said Toast, “and look after each other.”

And with that they were dismissed. Somebody bellowed for volunteers to man the rooftops, and Max shoved Hue and Akuna gently in the other direction - the bottleneck would be safest for them, probably, with a single place to focus and dozens of strong soldiers around them. The streets would be a shitfight. He went that way.

Once he was on the roof, he realised the genius of the Hand for this purpose. The mess of streets in the Palm looked random, twisted corners and crooked streets and a single broad boulevard narrowing like the straight flight of a bullet towards the elevator. There wasn’t a single place any vehicle wider than two men abreast could move, except that boulevard. Even the alleys where a motorcycle could fit twisted sharply, preventing intruders from gathering speed, getting them turned around and confused. The wide plaza at the base of the thumb could only be reached, he knew, by a strange and counterintuitive series of turns. At ground level, the whole city was untidy and haphazard. From above, it was clearly a trap.

Somebody asked him if he could shoot and he said yes, so they handed him a pistol and a couple of clips and warned him to be sparing. There was no time to run across town to the piece he’d stopped carrying, tucked under his pallet in his flop. He would make do. He found a spot on the roof of building, overlooking the main boulevard where it branched off towards the Thumb, and settled down to wait, pistol in one hand, and a convenient crowbar in the other.

He could feel the calm that violence brought him settling across his shoulders, the clarity. The dust cloud was growing nearer, the growl and hum of engines echoing off the thick bare walls of the Hand. The were coming, as Hue had said, to kill, to steal water, to smash this green and gentle place. Max was uncertain still as to whether he could be here, be gentle and grow green, but violence he knew he could manage. He could kill to defend what Furiosa had built here, would do it with grim pleasure.

The war party was drawing close now, unimpeded. The border patrols had all been drawn back into the Hand. Max counted vehicles, and kept counting - thirty, forty, fifty, and that was just the front line: a jumble of styles and sizes and levels of maintenance and embellishment, charging at the squat collection of buildings in the palms of the rocks.

Max drew in a deep, careful breath and checked his gun, and then the invaders broke over the city like a wave.

 ~

This kind of battle played tricks with Max’s sense of time. Later on he would think back and figure out and say that the sirens sound about halfway through morning-shift, and the war party hit the Palm at high-sun, and the sun was sliding down towards the mountains when the dust settled. But for now, there was none of that in his head - only the simple straightforward tasks he had to do.

As predicted, the mass of the invaders pulled up at the outer limits to converge and head straight down the boulevard, unable to turn aside or find any other entry. Max ignored them, watching instead for the nimble bikes which could break away from the whole, for anyone stupid enough to leave the vehicle and go on foot. There was nothing, for long, long minutes, only a few breakaway strays punctuated by shots from nearby rooftops, howls from below. There was more gunfire from nearer the Fingers, as the road narrowed and the invading vehicles were forced to slow, and a small explosion which caused a fair bit of screaming. But still they kept coming, slow and inexorable, clustering at the head of the road and taking potshots at the defenders on the roofs.

A half-dozen bikes wove through the slow-moving rigs and cars and turned off down the narrow street below Max. Mindful of his limited ammunition, he let them pick up speed until they were at the first turn, then took out the leader with a couple of shots. The crash resulted in a small fireball which took care of the rest of the bikes, and he picked off the lone survivor without difficulty.

The parade of vehicles was grinding to a halt, now - too many big rigs, not enough space. A glance showed that there was a pile-up happening closer to the elevator. The rigs were starting to disgorge troops on foot now, which complicated things. Max had aim decent enough for solid headshots, but not much ammunition: this would end in fighting face-to-face, in the narrow streets.

He fired and made corpses, ejected, reloaded, and kept firing. A head appeared over the edge of his nest on the roof. He hit it with his crowbar. Reloaded.

An explosion, near enough to rock him with the backlash.

He was out of ammunition.

The war party had ground completely to a halt. Below him, Max saw an invader in a spiked helmet put a knife in the eye of one of the defenders. He stuck the pistol into his belt, picked up his crowbar, and rolled off the roof into the melee.

~

Later, the crowbar was gone, but he had a knife from somewhere, and he slashed desperately at the arm around his throat, bright spots dancing in his vision.

Later, he had a pump-action shotgun, firing at the tires of a slow-moving rig while its driver screamed obscenities.

Later, he wrestled the wielder of a tommy-gun to the ground and punched him and punched him and punched him until his head was a crushed red mess.

Later, when the light was golden through the heavy curtain of dust and his lungs felt like they were on fire and something nearby actually was on fire, he staggered and fell under the weight of a tackle, felt the bright touch of a blade along his ribs - and then the weight was gone, and he rolled onto his back to see Furiosa standing over him, frowning faintly, bleeding from a head wound and looking like a terrifying warrior goddess.

“You?” she said. Somebody screamed, quite nearby, and her attention was diverted.

Max scrambled to his feet, but she was already gone.

~

Much, much later, he found himself sitting, exhausted, in the shade of a building, staring and the wreck of a rig which blocked the wide road and wishing he had some water, or enough energy to go and get some water. The shadows were long now, and the battle was over. Won. Probably. Nobody was trying to kill him now and the vehicles were still and the Palm was - not quiet, but there was no more gunfire.

“Come on, friend,” said somebody kindly. Max made an effort, lifted his head.

“Thick?” he muttered.

“Hey, it’s my nameless friend,” said Thick. “You look like a mile of bad road, nameless.”

Max grunted, because… yeah. “Got water?”

Thick handed him a tin cup, filled it from a pouch he had slung over his shoulder. “You got injuries need treating?”

Max thought about that, sipping on his water. He was battered head to foot, aching and exhausted, and it was difficult, right now, to distinguish injuries which might need attention from injuries which needed rest. He settled on a shrug, which hurt.

“Can you walk?”

Max sighed and finished his water. “Maybe. Yeah.”

“Bleeding?”

“Yeah.”

“Breathing?”

Max rolled his eyes.

“Up you get, then.”

He leaned on Thick for some of the way, but once he was moving, it was easier. His leg brace was still in place, no bones broken. Walking, breathing - yeah, bleeding some, but a cursory inspection found only shallow wounds and sluggish leaks.

“Guess we won,” he grunted. The Palm was a wreck of car and corpses, but it still stood.

“Guess so,” said Thick.

“Who were they?”

“Dunno. From the west, I heard someone say. Reckon they were a bunch of different gangs joined together, since none of ‘em alone would have a chance.”

“Many dead?”

“Some. Dunno the full yet. More lived.”

The plaza was a mess of wounded and those helping. Max found a spot out of the way, waved off Thick when he asked if he needed anything, and sat.

Somebody came around with a pot of broth, poured a ladleful in his cup. He drank it. A nurse came and crouched by him, cleaned the wound on his arm and pressed his sore ribs to check for breakages, then moved on.

He might have slept some.

The sun went down and in the centre of the plaza, a fire was started. Not a real bonfire - there was no wood, after all - but a low, smoky affair, bundled chaff and leaves, heavily fueled with gasoline. People drifted in that direction, though there was no need of its heat or light. Even Max managed to find his feet, moved over to slump in the circle of weary faces.

For a while, there was no conversation in the gathering crowd. Someone lit a cigarette. An old woman voiced a wistful wish for marshmallows. Someone started to cry, helpless frightened sobs that were quickly choked back.

“In the Joe days,” came a clear voice, “It was bad for everyone.” A sigh rippled through the crowd, and heads turned to the woman sitting on the ground by the fire. She was past middle age, dark hair streaked with grey, large and soft-bodied. “In the Joe days,” she continued, “There was war, always, and death. There wasn’t enough food, and water was poured out on the ground so the Joe could show how much he had without giving any of it up.”

“Schlanger,” somebody hissed, and there was a chorus of spitting.

“Joe took people and made them things,” said the storyteller. “He took boys and made them weapons with his lies. He took girls and made them livestock. He took all kinds of people and used them for their health and strength to serve him, their blood and flesh to feed his armies, their souls and hearts for his ego.”

There was a beat of silence. Nobody moved or spoke.

“We are not things.”

The storyteller first, but it was echoed back and murmured around and around the circle, rising. “We are not- we are not - we - we are not things! We are not things!”

“She knew!” cried the storyteller, over the din. “She was the thing Joe prized most, his favoured pet, and she knew it was a lie.”

“Angharad,” someone whispered. The little frightened one had screamed that name when the girl fell from the rig, and Max had forgotten it until now.

“The Splendid,” someone else said, and “The defiant one.”

“She stole herself away from him,” said the storyteller. “She took her sisters and she went to Furiosa, who had been a made thing for breeding and a thing for war but remembered her youth and freedom, and they made a plan. They ran away, and when Joe went after them, they fought him and tore off his face.”

Another chorus of spitting.

“We are not things,” said the storyteller. “Angharad died free; she died grasping her own self with both hands and giving none of it back. Today we fought for our homes. For the place we built and the plants we grow, for our children and our friends.”

“Not for Valhalla.”

“Not for a lie.”

“Not for a glorious death.”

“Not for a leader.”

“Today we fought,” said the storyteller, her voice rising triumphantly over the murmurs, “Because we are people, and we choose to.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Post-apocayptic trivia 1: It is possible to attract cultures of wild yeast using a starchy liquid like potato water.  
> Post-apocalyptic trivia 2: In areas around Chernobyl, there are places where organic matter does not decompose, because the first thing the radiation killed were the microorganisms responsible for decomposition. I figure yeast would be similarly affected, making wild yeast very hard to cultivate and functional compost basically liquid gold.  
> Post-apocalyptic trivia 3: While bread mold is one way of making penicillin, any old mold will do. Modern amoxycillin was intially cultivated from canteloupe. I didn't know this until I looked it up. I guess people in the future don't know that either.  
> Australian trivia: "Hooning", verb: the act of driving like a fucking dickhead; to hoon. Also, "Hoon", noun: one who hoons; a fucking dickhead.  
> Australian post-apocalyptic trivia: If anything survives the cleansing nuclear armageddon in the Australian outback, it will be the camels. I believe this in my heart. They are unkillable.
> 
> I'm sorry this note is so long, I just did a lot of research for this chapter ok.
> 
> Again, I am on tumblr at fools-game, or twitter at foolish_games, though I use social media pretty haphazardly.


	3. Chapter 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In the aftermath of battle, something is very, very wrong, but Max has a hard time making anybody else see it.

The day after the battle was a day of rest, of sorts. Max and anyone who had fought were given their rations and shooed away from the worst parts of the city as the others - those who couldn’t, or wouldn’t, fight - set about getting the place back to rights and dealing with the bodies. Max took the opportunity to take his aching bones away from the Hand altogether: he collected the Peb’s bike from the Finger garages and set out under the blazing sun, past the wrecks of the big rigs and the tracks of the invading war party, across the clean unmarked sand.

He didn’t go far, just a few hours on the spluttering, buzzing little bike. He found his way up onto a ridge of rock where he could still see the Hand far in the distance, the flashes of green under the sunlight, even the spires and smoke of Gas-Town on the horizon. But mostly it was just the empty Waste, just him and his bike, far away from crowds of people and lining up for rations, from a name and a bunk and a crew. Out here he was un-named and unneeded: he had nothing to fight for but his own skin, no-one to answer to but his own wants. There was nothing but silence and space and the Waste.

He breathed in and out, the dry air and intense sun, and felt the space around him not even dented with his presence. The wind kicked up and his tracks blew away, then died down and he was alone in the stillness again, gritty sand under him and nothing else.

When the shadows of the distant Hand began to stretch lazily across the sand like a sleeping cat, he got back onto his bike and went home.

That evening there was a fist-fight in the dinner line, and the attitude around the plaza was subdued and uneasy. Max kept his eyes down, drawing the vast lonesomeness of the Waste around his shoulders like armour, and tried not to look at the shattered vehicles and dropped weapons that still remained as reminders. His sleep was restless and wary, and he woke lashing out in panic.

He was in the Knuckleyard well before dawn, desperate for a distraction. It was cool at that time, quiet and empty, and more crowded than it had been: any invading vehicles still usable had been dragged off to the upper garages, but everything else, it seemed, had been dumped here, as a ‘later’ problem. Mangled bikes and shells of cars, piles of probably-broken weapons, and other things he couldn’t make out in the thin pale light. Unless the invading gangs had left behind others at their bases in the west, this was the detritus of their entire lives, broken on the walls of the Hand.

There would probably be lots of very useful stuff in there. He cracked his knuckles and dug in.

Others started arriving not long after - not just Rani’s crew, but a couple dozen other assorted workers, come to dig into the windfall. Old Matty dropped by Max with a pained grunt, nodded a greeting, and set to work without attempting conversation, which Max was grateful for, and Spout wouldn’t even look him in the eye. He pointed out the piles he’d started sorting - stuff for the kitchens, stuff for the infirmary, stuff for the gardens, weapons, and other - and ignored everyone else until Rani rapped him on the shoulder.

“Debrief time, kids.” He looked up. Akuna had arrived, looking drawn and weary, and Macka, hand bandaged and sheepish-faced. No Hue, nor Kez. Over by the rocks, the other crews were getting instructions and straggling off in groups. Max was holding in his hands some sort of effigy, a doll with extra arms down its back and frowning faces drawn on three sides of its head. He considered it, then tossed it in the ‘other’ pile.

“Hue’s alive,” said Akuna tightly. “Took some shrapnel. Med guys reckon she’ll lose the eye.”

Max winced. Sweet little Hue. Rani nodded once, sharply. “Fool?”

He shrugged one shoulder. “Got beat up some. Nothing major. You?”

“Had worse.” She looked at Macka. “What about Kez, seen her?”

He shook his head. “Nah, not since the infirmary. They sent me off and she stayed to help with the wounded.”

Rani frowned. “I’ll see if I can track her down.” She clapped her hands together. “Alright you lot, enough mushy feelings stuff. We’ve got helpers today but I don’t want to see you slacking. Right? Right.”

As the others turned their subdued attention to the task at hand, Rani beckoned Max aside.

“You’re friends with Kez, right? Seen her around?” Max shook his head. “You wanna go looking for her? You know where she bunks, check if she’s shirking.”

He didn’t think she would be shirking, but he was pleased to be sent anyway. He wasn’t precisely worried at Kez’s absence, but after the battle, he’d prefer to see her and know for himself that she was alright.

Kez had been given a bunk not long after Max. She wasn’t there, and nor was her bunkmate. The blanket on Kez’s pallet was neatly folded at the foot, and there was no other sign of her occupancy - her bunkmate had left a heavy coat folded by the cot, and a small box of trinkets, and a sock in need of mending, but on Kez’s cot there was nothing.

Rani had told him to check the bunks, but also to go looking for Kez. Kez wasn’t in her bunk. He would keep looking.

Kez’s bunkmate Solly was on a building crew, he knew. But the building crews weren’t in the new section under construction today, and after some frustrating wrong turns and entirely too much talking to people, Max tracked him down helping to shore up the crumpled, collapsing wall of one of the storehouses at the base of the Fingers.

One of the big rigs had slammed into it, apparently attempting to widen the path for its followers. But the Hand built solid; the wall was made of discarded tyres packed with earth, hammered and compressed until it was as solid and unyielding as stone. The impact had caused the wall to slump drunkenly but not fall; the rig had by all accounts been crushed and mangled beyond repair. The building crews were engaged in a lively debate over whether to repair the wall, or take it down completely and build it again. They were scratching diagrams in the dust of the ground and dirt on the walls and talking over one another excitedly; it was easy enough for Max to corner Solly.

“Seen Kez?”

Solly squinted at him. “Nah, not since the morning before the sirens. You’re on her crew, right?”

Max grunted an affirmative. “She hasn’t been to her bunk?”

A troubled look passed across Solly’s face. “I figure she got caught up in the battle, mate. They haven’t - look, there’s still people they haven’t put names to yet.”

“She wasn’t in the battle,” said Max. “Never mind, I’ll keep looking.” He turned, already thinking of the infirmary, when something occurred to him. “Did she have no stuff?”

“Stuff?”

“In her bunk. Nothing but a blanket.” Even Max had things - it was too hot for his jacket most days and the leather was brittle anyway so he left that, the box from the kitchens, a weapon, a change of clothes.

Solly shrugged. “Sorry. I didn’t notice if she had much stuff to leave, I was usually up before her anycase.”

With another grunt, Max left him and trudged towards the Thumb. It was getting on to high-sun. Rani would be wondering where he was.

He hadn’t been up the Thumb yet: the garages and kitchens were in the Fingers, and he’d had no call for the schoolrooms or infirmary that were housed in the sealed, purified chambers Joe had kept for himself and his wives. There were no lifts up to the Thumb, only stairs bolted into the rocky cliff face. In the Joe days there had been no outside access at all. Anybody wanting to enter Joe’s realm would be taken up the lifts into what were now called the Fingers, then have to make the trek across the precarious bridges between them. People too injured to walk were sometimes still taken up that way, and carried carefully on stretchers across the distance.

Max took the stairs, regretting it before he’d even started. They were sturdy enough, but the treads were made of whatever scrap had been lying around, unevenly spaced and too fucking high and his knee was throbbing before he reached the first landing. A young boy darted past him as he paused to rest, bounding higher like an energetic mountain goat. Max drank some water and stared sourly after the kid, already above him and still ascending.

He found the infirmary by dint of wandering the passages at random. It was a series of long, connected rooms cluttered with beds and chairs, crowded and smelling faintly like ill people. There were plenty of walking wounded and evidently not enough space or staff; nearly every person he saw looked harried and stressed. Kez had probably stayed in the Thumb to help out, he figured. She was that sort. She longed to be useful.

He slunk around until he spotted someone moving from bed to bed, making notes on a board. “Um,” he began. “I’m looking for my friend?”

The woman eyed him. “Name?”

“Kez.”

“What was she in for?”

“I don’t - she wasn’t injured, she was helping. Here.”

A frown. “If she’s assigned to the infirmary -”

“No, she’s ground crew. She was up here when the sirens went off, stayed to help.”

She squinted at him. “So what is it you want?”

“Nobody’s seen her since the battle.”

“Is she here, then?”

“I don’t know where she is,” said Max, frustrated. “This is the last place she was.”

The woman looked down at her notes, then around at the crowded infirmary. Somebody bumped past them on their way to a patient down the row. In the next room, a baby was crying. She was visibly ready to be elsewhere, her mind on other things. “You can look around, so long as you’re not in the way,” she said. “But it’s not the best time to be asking.”

“I won’t get in the way,” he promised.

The woman taking notes was right, though; everybody was busy, too busy to talk to Max about his missing friend. “Have you seen -” he began, over and over. “She was helping - no, ground crew - no, before the battle.” One man thought he might have remembered her but couldn’t say for sure; one woman nodded and nodded and was certain that she’d seen Kez napping in one of the side rooms just now, but it turned out to be somebody else. He touched the shoulder of a small woman with mousey brown hair, but it wasn’t her.

At last, he had some luck. “Kez, you said?” mused the doctor - the others all called him Doc, though he wasn’t old enough by half to have gotten a degree from a university: his tidy hair and beard were just beginning to grey. “Hmm, possibly. Short?”

Max held up a hand indicating Kez’s inability to see over his own shoulder. “Brown hair,” he added hopefully. “Likes to talk.”

“Umm. She helped me with a patient who’d fallen from the lift before the armada arrived at the city,” said the Doc. “After that, I don’t know.” He spread his hands helplessly. “I’m sorry, I really am busy,” he said, and then he was gone.

It was mid way through the afternoon shift by the time a grumpy, thirsty, and deeply frustrated Max made it back down to the plaza. He filled his canteen and slumped despondently back to the Knuckleyard, to be met by Rani in a towering bad mood. “The fuck have you been?”

“Looking for Kez.”

“I meant for you to check her bunk, not search every building in the city.”

“She hasn’t been to her bunk. Bunkmate hasn’t seen her. She’s missing.”

“She’ll turn up,” said Rani. Max stared at her. “Look, Fool. We are busy, alright? If Kez has taken off again, that’s her lookout.”

“I don’t think she has,” said Max, but Rani wouldn’t hear it, just waved him off.

“Tomorrow we’re being moved to a different job, other side of the Thumb, in the Waste. You skive off another day, you don’t get fed, alright?” Her face softened. “She’ll turn up, Fool. Where’s she going to go? Back to Gas-Town? She hates Gas-Town.”

Max couldn’t pull up the words to say what he wanted, to give voice to the alarm and suspicion growing in his belly. He only nodded mutely and went to spend what was left of the work day in silence with what was left of his subdued crew.

Kez wasn’t at the plaza kitchens for dinner, and went he went by her bunk again that evening, Solly shrugged at him apologetically. “If I see her, I’ll let you know,” was all he could offer.

Max didn’t sleep that night at all, paced his bunk until his bunkmate glared at him, then went and paced the streets, all the way to the edge of the waste, where he sat on a rock and stared out over the plains until sunrise, listening to his ghosts whisper and fret.

In the morning, they were set to work digging graves in the waste behind the Thumb.

In a macabre twist on the Hand’s create-grow-reuse everything philosophy, the graves were laid out in rows that would be planted over with crops later on, or fruit trees. The corpses of defenders and invaders alike would feed new green things, sweeten the sour earth, provide nourishments and shade and beauty. The crews dug in silence anyway, unbroken by Kez’s informative talk or Hue’s humming.

“Your sister?” Max managed to ask Akuna at high-sun. “Doing okay?”

Akuna shrugged. “Still got one eye. She’s. Mmm. She’s doing more okay than me. She keeps talking about how lucky she is, all the things she can still do.” She stared down at her hands. “She almost died.”

Max hunched his shoulders. “Scary.” Akuna nodded, squinted out at the horizon. “Okay if I go see her?”

“Sure,” said Akuna, eyebrows raised. “She’s still up in the infirmary, because of. Um. Infection?”

“Stairs,” said Max despairingly, but he went anyway.

Hue was in worse spirits than Akuna had predicted, but she mustered a painful smile up for Max when she saw him. “Almost got out without a scratch,” she said, “but one of their engines blew at the last minute.” Her head was swathed in pale wrappings, with a thick wad of bandages bound over her left eye socket. What he could see of her jaw at neck was covered in swollen lacerations and bruises. The other eye was reddened and her mouth was trembling with the effort of keeping her smile up.

Max was bad at sympathy, so he pressed her hand and left her with the slightly burned loaf of bread that the cooks had given him that morning. They were still turning out loaves with a strong beery taste and the approximate density of tyre rubber, but it was _bread_.

The infirmary was less crowded than the day before, but the staff looked no less rushed. He couldn’t see the Doctor who’d remembered seeing Kez, but the woman making notes was there, so he ducked around someone carrying piles of folded material and sidled up to her.

“Did you find your friend?” she asked.

He shook his head. “Still looking. There was someone fell off the lift before the fighting started, can you tell me where they are?”

“Name?”

“Dunno.”

She raised an eyebrow. “Friend of yours?”

“Someone who might’ve seen her.”

She sighed. “You can’t go interrogating patients. These people need rest.”

Max clamped down hard on his frustration. “I’m not gonna hurt anyone. I just want to ask some questions.”

But her expression had hardened, and it was clear she would be no help. She wouldn’t even let him loiter around, escorting him firmly to the door and shooing him off.

He was late back to afternoon shift, and Rani looked disappointed and cross.

~

He ate dinner that night with Macka and Matty, mostly in silence. “What happened to Kez?” Macka asked once, but Max only grunted and shook his head; he wasn’t ready to say that something had happened to Kez. He wasn’t ready to think it.

He didn’t think it at dinner, and he kept not thinking it as he trudged over to the garages under the Fingers, and then up to the cool, dim caves where he had been kept as a bloodbag. He hadn’t been up here since he came to the Hand. Hadn’t needed to; wanted to avoid them. But he needed to be sure, now.

The dead would be buried the following day, in the graves Max had helped to dig, but right now they were laid out on the stone ledges where the Warboys had sat while the bloodbags hung above them drained. The cages were gone, and so were the Warboys, and it was a peaceful place now, and Max wanted to tear off his skin rather than stay.

“Are you looking for someone in particular?” asked the old man who shuffled up and down the rows of dead. “Someone in the battle?” The left side of his face drooped like melted wax.

“My friend,” said Max. “She wasn’t in - she wasn’t supposed to be in the battle,” he said.

“Name?”

“Kez.”

The old man consulted his list, mumbling and squinting in the poor light from the dim electric bulbs overhead. “Nobody identified with that name,” he said at last, and Max breathed out in relief, but - “Y’can come see if she’s among the unidentified, there’s still some we’ve got no names for.”

Numbly, Max followed.

“Seems a shame to bury them with no names,” said the old man, shuffling to the end of the row. “Still, we can’t keep ‘em here. Even in this chill they won’t last. Here they are, these last four.” He fumbled at the wall, and the last sputtering bulb went on overhead.

The light flickered, and flickered, and there were faces all around him, accusing and dead, voices in his bad ear like rushing water.

He swallowed, shook his head with a jerk. Touched her hair. “This’s her. Kez.” Her face was mottled. Three days dead, and her cheeks and eyes were sunken, skin grey, the flesh underneath beginning to turn.

“Sorry, friend,” said the old man kindly. “You want a minute?”

“No,” said Max, turning away. He didn’t need to sit and look at her face; it would come to him at night anyhow. “Wait. Do you know where they found her?”

The old man shrugged. “I don’t think anyone mentioned. How come?”

Max turned back, something tugging at a part of his brain he hadn’t used in years. “Just - no blood?” he muttered. He gingerly tilted her head back, pulled away the scarf. She hadn’t owned a scarf.

The bruises on her neck were nearly black. Max’s hands twitched, and he laid one very gently over the marks. Whoever had done it had large hands, bigger than Max’s.

~

It was quiet in the highest part of the Thumb, just after dawn. The air up here smelt clearer than down below, but the heat of the day came early, too.

He’d expected to run into security, to be turned back or sent away at any point, but a murmured question or two had gotten him pointed here, to a cavern with open windows on one side to the wasteland below, with a long low table and paper - actual paper! - tacked up around the walls, covered in writing he didn’t bother to read. He looked out the window instead, to the collection of buildings cradled in the Palm, and tried to ignore the ghosts.

“It _is_ you.” He turned, blinking away the visions. “I knew I saw you.”

Furiosa had a healing scrape on her forehead, flecks of grey in the hair at her temples. She was doing something with her eyes he didn’t recognise - smiling, that was it - and she was very, very beautiful, and all Max could see was the dead. He wanted to scream.

“Have you come back to stay?” said Furiosa.

“I need your help,” Max gritted out, and saw her fall into seriousness at once, smile wiped away.

“Of course,” she said. “Anything.” He blinked at the absurdity of that offer. 

“My friend has been murdered.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is actually the story I started writing, before I backtracked and wrote 10,000 words of backstory.   
> This chapter's research notes:  
> The buildings in the Palm which Max sees being built/rebuilt are based around Earthships, which are completely rad and really are built out of discarded tyres! http://earthship.com/  
> In the film, we only ever see people entering/leaving the Citadel from the Warboy garages - even Immortan Joe comes down that lift in his Gigahorse. If there's another way in, we never see it.   
> Search terms involved in research included things like "post-mortem bruising" "strangulation post-mortem" "human decay rate warm climate". Dear shadowy government agency, I swear I'm not a serial killer.


End file.
